PITTSBURGH (AP) — Clapping and singing along to a klezmer duet, dozens of Jewish university students in Oakland and their guests welcomed the arrival of a 300-year-old Torah scroll last week.

The scroll had served generations in a Polish Jewish community, survived the Holocaust hidden in a farmhouse wall, was smuggled out of communist Poland and then served a New Castle synagogue until its closing at the end of 2017 due to its dwindling and aging membership.

Syndicated Columnist

It turns out that, with apologies to Nancy Pelosi, Republicans really did have to pass the tax bill so people could find out what’s in it.

The GOP has made gains on the generic congressional ballot in recent weeks, with warmer feelings about the tax plan contributing to the upward trend. The improving numbers at least raise the prospect that, just as in 2016, Democrats will be lured by their abiding conviction in President Donald Trump’s inevitable failure and their deep loathing of him to misplay what should be a winning hand.

DEAR ABBY: My boyfriend, “Hal,” and I have been dating for a year and a half, living together for six months. I’m afraid he feels emasculated. Because I make more money than he does, a lot of the responsibility for paying the bills lands on me. We try to split things down the middle, but recent complications with his job have meant it doesn’t always work out that way.

Syndicated Columnist

Our generally strong economy has yet to cast its blessings on American farm country. Incomes there are headed for their lowest level since 2006. And farmers are going deep into debt to keep their heads above water.

President Trump’s budget blueprint would only make things worse for U.S. agriculture. Trump’s hostility to trade deals has already inflicted damage on an economic sector highly dependent on exports. And that’s on top of his deficit-exploding tax bill and crankedup federal spending, sure to make borrowing still more expensive.

GANGNEUNG, South Korea (AP) — When Kang Hwa-seon married into a family that lived in a thatched house in this eastern coastal city in the early 1940s, she was in essence a mother to her little brother-inlaw. She fed him, took him to school, watched him grow into a handsome boy who carried her baby daughter on his shoulder.

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — During World War II, four American servicemen who graduated from the same upstate New York high school had their photo taken for the yearbook: a Coast Guardsman, a Navy pilot, a sailor and a soldier. The pilot never made it home and is still listed as missing in action.

Now, 75 years after the four classmates went off to war, an effort to find the pilot’s Pacific crash site is in the works, thanks to that long-ago black-and-white snapshot.

You don’t sit in it and make sandcastles. Instead, you load a topographic map on a computer and project a 3D image onto the sand. After sculpting it with your hands, you can feel geological features such as mountains and canyons.

In early December, the Idaho School for the Deaf and the Blind in Gooding purchased an augmented reality sandbox using a $10,000 grant from the America’s Farmers Grow Rural Education program, sponsored by the Monsanto Fund.

Outdoors Columnist

Winter months are often times of meditation for Montana hunters, times when we look back over the past several months and contemplate our times afield. This time of year, we often see photos in our local newspaper and on bulletin boards in sporting good stores, tangible proof of successful hunts. Typically, these are snapshots of firsttime hunters with their first harvested game, or “OH WOW” pictures of a big buck or bull, or photos of the old bird dog or young pup, the campfire crew or pack-laden mules.